Travel – Page 2 – Poems, Pictures & Prose by Saaleha Idrees Bamjee

Delhi Day One

The haze here in Delhi makes for murky photography, but Lightroom has an adjustment slider for that.

Scenes from Connaught Place, National Gallery of Modern Art and India Gate.

(Follow on Instagram @saaleha_b to view the Insta Stories)

TBT: Cameron Highlands, Malaysia,December 2014

The air in tea country is chilled to perfection.

But while my lungs bloomed open in the bracing atmosphere of Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands, my camera did not appreciate the damp. It wouldn’t recognise my lenses and these pictures, from our visit to the BOH Sungei Palas Plantation, are the only DSLR captures I have from our stay in the highlands.

If you’re a Lightroom user, click on the link to download the develop preset I created to process these photographs; sb-camerongreen.

TBT: Koh Samui , Thailand, December 2014

Sunrises to wake up for. Sunsets to linger over. Chill and Eat.

Send a postcard to your old life; I Am Never Leaving This Place.

High Tea at The Library

The Damnoen Saduak Floating Market

Mostly frequented by vistors on day-tour packages, the Damnoen Saduak Floating Market is blighted by a proliferation of tourist tack and dust-catchers.

Despite it not being the authentic experience one hankers for as a traveller (and really, what can remain authentic when every single sightseer wants off the beaten path?), there still are beautiful moments floating along the canals.

A scene that stays with me is the one where a Buddhist monk paddles through the market, collecting food alms from the stall-owners. He stops at a stall where a woman and her little boy kneel with folded palms while the monk makes a blessing. It is a tender instance of pure faith suspending the banal bargaining for magnets and elephant-shaped keyrings.

There were so many other pictures to be made but I forgot to pack a spare battery for my camera. I shot the following images with my phone.

Sawatdee kha Bangkok

Walk along an artery like Sukhumvit Road; the Skytrain omnipresent above your head, the buildings striking up and down like piano hammers. Ignore the city’s supra-urban excesses, its love for sale, its hovering haze. Look for its ghost houses, the intricacies of its worship, the sensitivity of its wai, its beguilingly balanced cuisine. And it will not be the city imposing its will upon you, but you soaking up its humid vitality until even your hair coils into springs.

Traditional silk extraction demo at the Jim Thompson House

The Grand Palace and Wat Pho

TBT: Washington DC and NYC, Winter 2012

Washington DC

The capital of memorials, monuments and museums.

Dwight D Eisenhower Executive Office building

William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building

Bearing Witness by Martin Puryear

Sculpture in the Woodrow Wilson Plaza

Dwight D Eisenhower Executive Office building

The Washington Monument

World War Two Memorial

The White House

At the National Museum of Natural History

National Gallery of Art

New York City in December

MOMA, Harlem, Christmas lights, the village, SoHo, Grand Cental Station, Happy New Year.

Marriage Proposal at the Grand Central Station

The National Museum of the American Indian

New Year's Eve, Central Park — New Year’s Eve, Central Park

At MOMA: Ray Tomlinson created the world’s first email system

Sports Headgear for Muslim Women by Cindy van den Bremen

People Looking At Modern Art

A Picasso

Appropriating The Scream

Christmas Window Displays

The Friends’ Apartment Building

New York’s narrowest house

Jimi

Central Park

American Radiator Building

The solitary dirty tile reminds of the soot that once covered the entire ceiling here.

Over the Subway

The National Museum of the American Indian

Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House

Happy New Year

Collectors Treasury, Johannesburg

Collectors Treasury
C.T.P. House, 244 Commissioner street, Johannesburg, Gauteng
Mon – Fri: 09:00 – 17:00
Sat: 10:00 – 13:00

I was literately floored, my appetite for tsundoku, ravenous.
Volumes of volumes; first editions, rarities, autographed flyleaves, cursive inscriptions, gifted books – given away, just stacked there, urging the bibliophile to succumb.